Written Questions - Flow From Party to Answering Body¶
Inspired by @philbgorman / https://cdn.rawgit.com/Mognar/sankey/master/index.html
Documenting the generation of a Sankey diagram using Python to chart the number of responses from Answering Bodies to questions tabled by members of the House of Commons of a particular party for the 2015/16 Parliamentary session.
In [1]:
#Quick peek at the API
#http://lda.data.parliament.uk/commonswrittenquestions.json?_view=Written+Questions&_pageSize=10&_page=0
stub='http://lda.data.parliament.uk'.strip('/')
#http://explore.data.parliament.uk/?learnmore=Commons%20Written%20Questions
#commonswrittenquestions All Commons Written Questions
#commonswrittenquestions/answeringdepartment?q={query} All Commons Written Questions By Answering Body
#commonswrittenquestions?mnisId={mnisId} All Commons Written Questions By Member
#commonswrittenquestions?session={session} All Commons Written Questions By Session
#commonswrittenquestions/tabled?startDate={startDate}&endDate={endDate} All Commons Written Questions By Table Date
#commonswrittenquestions?uin={uin} All Commons Written Questions By UIN
#commonswrittenquestions/{id} Commons Written Questions by ID
In [6]:
#We're going to have to call the API somehow
import requests
#To make thinks more efficient if we do this again, cache requests
import requests_cache
requests_cache.install_cache('parlidata_cache', backend='sqlite')
#(It helps if I remember to specify a persistent backend.., doh!)
In [7]:
#Get data from URL
def getURL(url):
print(url)
r=requests.get(url)
print(r.status_code)
return r
#Should build a proper recursive loader
def loader(url):
items=[]
done=False
r=getURL(url)
while not done:
items=items+r.json()['result']['items']
if 'next' in r.json()['result']:
r=getURL(r.json()['result']['next']+'&_pageSize=500')
else: done=True
return items
In [8]:
#Get the data for a particular session
url='{}/{}.json?session={}'.format(stub,'commonswrittenquestions','2015/16')
items=loader(url)
In [9]:
#Preview of the record for a single item
#As this is all JSON, maybe consider looking at https://www.sqlite.org/json1.html
#Or use mongo etc?
items[0]
Out[9]:
The answer data includes a reference to the Member who tabled the question, but not their party. We need to pull that from the member database.
In [10]:
#Function to get member data back from the member API.
#Note the form of the test URL...
def memberData(memberURL):
r=requests.get(memberURL)
return r.json()['result']['primaryTopic']
memberData('http://lda.data.parliament.uk/members/4393.json')
Out[10]:
In [11]:
#Generate a set of members who have tabled questions that have been answered
#Note that the identifier Linked Data URL doesn't link... so patch it...
members= {'{}.json'.format(i['tablingMember']['_about'].replace('http://','http://lda.')) for i in items}
#Get member data for each member
membersdata=[memberData(m) for m in members]
In [12]:
#Generate a lookup of the party from the member identifer as a dict
def getParty(memberDataURL):
for m in membersdata:
if m['_about']==memberDataURL:
return m['party']['_value']
return {}
memberparty={m['_about']:getParty(m['_about']) for m in membersdata}
In [13]:
#Get the party of the person who tabled an answered question and answering department(s)
def getPartyDept(item):
rel=[]
party=memberparty[item['tablingMember']['_about']]
#Note that there may be more than one answering body, so return a list of (party,answering body) pairs
for body in item['AnsweringBody']:
rel.append((party,body['_value']))
return rel
#For each answer, lookup the party of the member who tabled the question and the answering department(s)
#Use this cunning trick to collapse the nested list of responses to a flat list of (party,answering body) pairs
#http://stackoverflow.com/a/952952/454773
#[item for sublist in [[1,2],[3]] for item in sublist]
rels=[rel for s in [getPartyDept(q) for q in items] for rel in s]
In [14]:
rels[:3]
Out[14]:
In [15]:
#Generate a dataframe of the pairs...
import pandas as pd
df=pd.DataFrame(rels)
df.columns=['party','answeringBody']
#Count the number of responses for each (party, answering body) pair
dfc=df.groupby(['party','answeringBody']).size().reset_index()
dfc.columns=['source','target','value']
dfc.head()
Out[15]:
In [16]:
#Generate the list of dicts the Sankey widget expects
links=dfc.dropna().to_dict(orient='records')
links[:3]
Out[16]:
In [17]:
#And generate the Sanley diagram
from ipysankeywidget import SankeyWidget
SankeyWidget(value={'links': links},
width=1000, height=800,margins=dict(top=0, bottom=0,left=250,right=250))
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